Writing Architectural History

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time--from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps--Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England’s nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.

This book presents a collection of recent writings on architecture and urbanism in the United States, with topics ranging from colonial to contemporary times.

What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise past time and relate it to the present? How does historical evidence translate into historical narrative? Should architectural history be useful for practicing architects? If so, how? Leach treats the disciplinarity of architectural history as an open question, moving between three key approaches to historical knowledge of architecture: within art history, as an historical specialisation and, most prominently, within architecture. He suggests that the confusions around this question have been productive, ensuring a rich variety of approaches to the project of exploring architecture historically. Read alongside introductory surveys of western and global architectural history, this book will open up questions of perspective, frame, and intent for students of architecture, art history, and history. Graduate students and established architectural historians will find much in this book to fuel discussions over the current state of the field in which they work.

A history of the influence of communication technologies on Western architectural theory. The discipline of architecture depends on the transmission in space and time of accumulated experiences, concepts, rules, and models. From the invention of the alphabet to the development of ASCII code for electronic communication, the process of recording and transmitting this body of knowledge has reflected the dominant information technologies of each period. In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking. Carpo highlights the significance of the invention of movable type and mechanically reproduced images. He argues that Renaissance architectural theory, particularly the system of the five architectural orders, was consciously developed in response to the formats and potential of the new printed media. Carpo contrasts architecture in the age of printing with what preceded it: Vitruvian theory and the manuscript format, oral transmission in the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century transition from script to print. He also suggests that the basic principles of "typographic" architecture thrived in the Western world as long as print remained our main information technology. The shift from printed to digital representations, he points out, will again alter the course of architecture.

Engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory, in search of sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, plagiarized tabernacles, and other phenomena missing from architectural history. This collection by “architectural history's most beguiling essayist” (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure—phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart. We read about the statistical investigation of lightning strikes in France by the author-astronomer Camille Flammarion, which leads Eigen to reflect also on Foucault, Hamlet, and the role of the anecdote in architectural history. We learn about, among other things, Olmsted's role in transforming landscape gardening into landscape architecture; the connections among hedging, hedge funds, the High Line, and GPS bandwidth; timber-frame roofs and (spider) web-based learning; the archives of the Houses of Parliament through flood and fire; and what the 1898 disappearance and reappearance of the Trenton, New Jersey architect William W. Slack might tell us about the conflict between “the migratory impulse” and “love of home.” Eigen compares his essays to the “gathering up of seeds that fell by the wayside.” The seedlings that result create in the reader's imagination a dazzling display of the particular, the contingent, the incidental, and the singular, all in search of a narrative.